Friday, 17 April 2009

Words to Work

Words to work is a set of six typographic posters created by ad agency Publicis Mojo. The purpose behind the posters is basically to have fun with the typical behaviours and attidues within the design industry. Only 100 of each poster wil be printed and given away free to clients , colleagues and friends.

Dynamic Typography Visuals

A current assignment im working on is to animate a piece of text in the way we feel appropriate with no creative boundaries. The passge we have to animate is from the book Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

"I lie in the round clearing
and let the sun wash over me
my ears tuned into the wind,
whipping through the treetops
I’m freed from the gravity and float up
open my eyes and it’s gone."

Below are a select few visuals.


Kinetic Typography

A useful website hosting 15 of prime examples of Kinetic Typography. All are high quality and demonstrate the sheer flexibilty and crerative power within animation programs. Personal favourite of mine would have to be "Citizen Cope - Let The Drummer Kick"

Alison Carmichael

Carmichael has hit number one on my favourite typography artist list. Carmichael's work is fresh, free flowing and hand rendered. Yes you heard correctly hand rendered...NO computers. Whilst yes Carmichael's work uses current design trends it clearly sticks out for creativity and composition. Her latest work is self promotion and makes use of typical non standard canvases we view and write on throughout our lives.

"Clean Me" is a prime example:

To create the piece her artwork was projected on to the back of the van then the dirt was rubbed out by......guess what......yes her finger!

Below are just a few examples of Cramichael's work:

Stranger Than Fiction

Stumbled across the opening title sequence for new film "Stranger Than Fiction" and immediatly fell in love. Yes love is a strong word but I personally feel it awesome. The concept is simple but is so so effective. I won't waffle on but take a look and see if your opinion is the same.


Bad vs. Good

I think this piece sums up my feelings I initially had within my previous blog. The design clearly demonstrates the "disaster" that is currently surrounding us within the design world. Why oh why is everyone using safe old Helvetica/sans serif fonts. Jeez push the boat out and experiment. The thousands of typefaces we have within the world why does it always have to be HELVETICA. The composition clearly conveys how we are being blinded by bad typography and the effort that is involved to be able to view good typography.


Bad Typography Is Everywhere // Good Typography Is Invisible

A of Importance

Ive recently been looking at a whole variety of typography styles and trying to avoid the conventional style that seems to be being used in every design that I seem to see. However this design did catch my eye and make me consider the current design trend. I immediately liked the simplistic yet edgy design and composition. The combination of the grunge style background and clean sans serif font drew my eye straight to the type and the use of words. I am hoping its part of a whole alphabetical design scheme and feel as posters they would really stop and make people read and consider the important words in their lives.

Filippo Marinetti

Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti is one of the founding fore-fathers of the typical graphic design style used within modern day designs we see all around ourselves everyday. Marinetti was a leading member within the futurist movement writing many books which helped promote the and create what we know of it today. . "Zang Tumb Tumb" (1914) is one of the most prominent pieces of Marinetti's work. It is a graphic account of the Battle of Tripoli and uses expressive typography with poetic impressions to illustrate the repetition of the drumbeat of war as a powerful machine.

I feel this design is a tribulation of the time and shows how ahead of his time in design Filippo Marinetti was. The layout and colours have evidently stood the test of time as it still looks fresh, clean and highly modern nearly a century on.

Marinetti not only used typography in the conventional way. He believed typography could be explored and developed upon and began using it to make futuristic geometric illustrations.

Mountains + Valleys + Streets x Joffre, 1915 depicts an aerial view impression of an Italian landscape.

Whilst personally I'm not a huge fan of the final composition of this piece, i do feel it shows the flexibility of typography and reminds me strongly of the flow and structure of kinetic typography which is becoming an ever increasing form of animating type.